Curtis Boudreaux

The man I am leaving has a beauty mark and a lanyard on a hook by the door, and it is the middle of the night in his house. Everyone is asleep. I have been Ramón Escobedo for less than a minute, and already I am standing at his kitchen counter with his phone lit in my hand, and the wheel is open on the screen. Nothing is wrong with him. His knees are fine. The house is quiet. But it is so quiet that I can hear my own wanting, and it is not a thing I am willing to say out loud, even here, even to nobody. So I press.

Cold tile, then a different cold under my bare feet, smaller tiles, gritty. Warm light on my left. My right hand is against my jaw with a razor stopped there, and my left is flat on the cool curve of a porcelain sink, taking my weight. Foam on half my face. Steam and the smell of wet street through a window gone blue with early morning. I breathe in. My belly sits against the sink's edge, a soft, settled weight, and my back is long, a tall man's back, leaning.

The razor is already moving. It goes up the jaw against the grain, and the corner of my mouth comes and goes with no hesitation at all, and the second half is done faster than the first, and I did not decide that.

The shirt on my back is thin, washed soft, and it gives me the first thing: a drawer, a woman's laugh from the other room, *take that one, it's the only one that doesn't pull*. His hand pulling it over his head, one arm and then the other, the cotton catching on his shoulder, the dull ache there that he has stopped mentioning. Plaid flannel at my legs, a drawstring knotted, and the knot gives me a child, small and furious at a bedtime, hanging off his leg. Then another. Then the third, a baby, asleep on his chest on this same floor at four in the morning, and the whole of him slack with a love that has no words in it.

The sink under my palm is cold and slightly rough where the enamel has worn. Under it, a hundred mornings: the pipe knocking, the girlfriend's toothbrush leaning in the cup beside his, his careful space made for her in the cabinet. He is dating, and he is careful, and he is happy in a way he has not yet said aloud to anyone. A ring he never bought. A conversation he rehearses in this mirror.

A toothpick, in the corner of my mouth when I touch my lip. He chews them when he thinks. Boardrooms, blinds half down, a bound report, a number that is wrong by a decimal, and him finding it while others stare. Money in the quiet, more than he tells anyone. A bar he never walked into, a glass he never lifted, a clean line down his life. Something spiritual, unnamed, that comes at this hour, in the blue before the day: a sense that being awake is a gift he did not earn.

My jaw is smooth. I run my thumb up it. Nothing catches.

I set the razor on the sink's edge. I look at my hand, this broad pale hand with the tendons rising, turn it over, and look at the palm, which is warm and dry and perfectly steady. Then I look up into the mirror at blue eyes, thin silver hair, a clean face that is not mine.

"Good morning, Curtis," I say, and his voice is low and unhurried.

I wonder how long before I want again. Whether I will wake up as him tomorrow, or whether the wanting is already starting, quietly, under his ribs.